Andrew Grimes: I have heard enough of 9/11 conspiracy theories

Some of our more callow historians are astonished that recent surveys suggest that up to 30 per cent of the populations of Britain and the USA believe that the murderous destruction of the Twin Towers in New York 10 years ago was orchestrated by elements in the US government.

Even the hole blown into one side of the Pentagon, say the sceptics, was not made by the fourth hi-jacked plane, but by a precisely aimed US army missile, though it killed US military personnel.

Some of our more callow historians are astonished that recent surveys suggest that up to 30 per cent of the populations of Britain and the USA believe that the murderous destruction of the Twin Towers in New York 10 years ago was orchestrated by elements in the US government.

Even the hole blown into one side of the Pentagon, say the sceptics, was not made by the fourth hi-jacked plane, but by a precisely aimed US army missile, though it killed US military personnel.

I feel that the bewilderment of these historians might be reduced if they took a side course in mass psychology. In all countries, at all times, there will always be a vociferous minority so far gone in paranoid fantasy who refuse to accept rational and factually established explanations for a hideous and world-shaking atrocity.

It wasn’t the gangster who shot the cop. It was the cop’s bullet hitting himself, in ricochet, from his own shot. Such goes the type of argument which attempts to exculpate the 19 disciples of Osama bin Laden from seizing four passenger-laden commercial airliners and using them as flying bombs to murder a total of nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

OK, maybe it was these guys who hi-jacked and flew the planes. But if it was, they were hirelings of bigwigs in the US Defense department who needed universal outrage and a huge civilian body count to justify starting an oil war in the middle east. That’s one moronic scenario. Another is that maybe yes, the president and his experts in the White House knew, from intelligence, that Osama’s boys were on their way to wreck the World Trade Center, but so what? Why not let them do it? Bush needed one excuse to finish what his presidential dad started in Iraq, and another to rough up Saddam.

And if Bush himself was too thick to think like that, there were specialists in the trickery of warmongering who could do the thinking for him.

I have been listening to lunatic arguments like these all week, some spouted by cranks from my television screen, others, more alarmingly, delivered, in full sobriety several hours before closing time, by dullard acquaintances in office pubs. What these explicators of the foulest mass murder in transatlantic history are saying is this: the US government connived at – or allowed – a crime which obliged hundreds of civilian Americans to jump to their deaths from high storey offices rather than roast to death; that it sanctioned the explosive penetration of the Pentagon, its main defence headquarters; and that it drew the line at sacrificing the White House by arranging for the client hi-jacked airliner on its way there to crash in Pennsylvania.

Such cynical and embittered conjectures devalue the tragedy of the men and women, high in the towers, who dwelt during their last moments in unimaginable hell; they belittle the sacrificial valour of the New York firemen who died trying to save them; and they deride the testimony of air crews and passengers of four planes who, suppressing their terror, communicated, by seat phones, what their pitiless captors were doing during their 15 minute countdowns to oblivion. Sound-bites of the heroic, but sadly futile fight that the passengers of the passengers aboard United 93 fought with kitchen pans and cutlery to re-claim the cockpit from their murderers survive on at least a dozen taped calls. But sceptics dismiss such unchallengeable testimony as fakery. That plane, they aver, was shot down by a US missile. Where, they ask, looking at photographs of the Pennsylvanian hole in the ground, are the plane’s wings and fuselage?

For the deniers, there can be no heroes; and the only true villains are in the White House. Seized on, with especially repulsive glee, is the manner of the slow and utter crumbling of the two towers, the southern one following its northern twin, like a deck of badly laid pancakes. Neither collapse, they cry, could have been accomplished without an organised demolition. So, in the weeks before the suicide crashes, explosives must have been planted in strategic parts of each building, with, perhaps, a fuse attached for operating by remote control at a given signal from the chief instigator. That instigator, it is madly suggested, must have been someone high up in the US’s official sapper trade. A team of swarthy Arabs going up and down day after day with sacks of gelignite would have been stopped before they could finish the job. The janitors would have stopped them, even if the President would not. So the nonsense goes.

It is always healthy to put tough questions to democratic leaders – and a few are certainly due about the seemingly traditional reluctance in Washington of one Federal intelligence unit to share fresh Al Qaeda info with another in the days before the strike. But to accuse the man in the Oval Office of presiding over a treasonous plot to murder nearly 3,000 of his own citizens – come on, that’s plainly insane.

Forth Bridge painting will be complete at last

It is no longer true that the painting of the mighty Forth Bridge, which links Edinburgh with Fife, is a job which never ends. In future it will enjoy at least 25 years between one anti-corrosive brush up and another. This is because Leigh Paints, a thrusting and ingenious firm based in Bolton, has sold the bridge’s Scottish managers a new form of preserving paint which sticks.

Not a day has gone by since its construction in 1890 without teams of highly paid daubers balancing on the railway bridge’s girders and moving slowly from one end to the other, and then slowly back again. They used up 240,000 litres of paint to stop its 230,000 square metres of ironwork from rusting. Outdated paint, that is.

The more adhesive Bolton stuff enables the English language to shed a rather trite metaphor of comparison. It also enables the SNP’s tight-fisted Scottish parliament to reduce its wages bill on ironwork painters by at least 50 per cent.

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